As an organization, you want to work smarter, more efficient and agile, so that you can quickly respond to developments and stay ahead of the competition. This requires a digital transformation, but it turns out to be not so easy.
There are a total of eight areas where you as an organization need to take action to make a smooth transition to a mobile organization in which your employees can fully enjoy the mobile experience without sacrificing safety, compliance and business agility.
These are the 8 areas you need to pay attention to become a mobile organization.
1. Mobile organization: inventory and plan of action
Application landscape
Gaining insight into the total application landscape is an important part of the inventory. Modern organizations use large numbers of applications, but the overview is often lacking.
Understanding which applications are available and who uses them is crucial. With this insight, you determine which of these applications will soon be mobile-ready so that your employees can work as well as possible.
Identify security risks
It is then important to identify security risks as carefully as possible. What risks do you run as an organization as soon as certain information leaves the building? What could be the consequences of data loss or a data leak occurs due to a stolen or hacked mobile device?
Make a thorough risk analysis so that you know exactly which organizational data you should best protect and think about the steps to take in the event of an incident.
All the choices you make in this phase determine the design of the technology that you will soon need as a mobile organization. That is why it is essential that you always start with the strategy and policy.
2. BYOD, CYOD or COPE
There are three strategies for mobile working: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Choose Your Own Device (CYOD) and COPE (Corporate Owned Device).
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
At BYOD, employees are allowed to work with their personal devices. This ensures lower organizational costs because you do not have to purchase these devices yourself as an organization. Because employees are allowed to work with their own equipment, they are immediately productive. Because you as an organization have little control over the equipment with which business applications and organizational data are accessed, extra measures are needed to prevent, for example, a hack or data leaks. Always remember employees should feel like their homes in any organization.
Choose Your Own Device (CYOD)
With this strategy, employees can choose from a number of devices, after which you purchase the chosen equipment as an organization. The mobile devices are owned by the organization, while employees can choose which equipment they prefer to use.
This way you can ensure that only well-supported equipment is used, without costing your employees. The costs are higher, but you have more control over the security of organizational data and applications.
Corporate Owned Personally Enabled (COPE)
At COPE, you as an organization purchase all equipment for business use, which also allows private use. You, therefore, have enormous control over which equipment may be used and also how this is done. Such as: what can and cannot employees do with a mobile device and which applications are allowed?
The device always remains the property of the organization, even if an employee leaves the company. A device can be wiped remotely without creating a privacy problem.
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3. Security, privacy and compliance
Shielding applications and data
In order to protect applications and data as well as possible, it is necessary to make an inventory of which data is used in the organization and what risks you run if data is exposed. For example, because data is sensitive to privacy or is of inestimable value to competitors.
Then it is important to find out who has access to which applications and data and via which devices.
Security measures
You can take many measures to ensure the safe use of applications and data: Firewalls, antivirus, VPN, micro-VPN, end-to-end encryption and authentication methods such as Two Factor Authentication (2FA).
Identify which measures still need to be taken, so that employees will soon also work safely on a mobile basis.
4. Link applications and data to devices
By using the right mobility platform, you can quickly and easily make exactly the right functionality (business juice applications and organizational data) available on the mobile equipment of your employees and at the same time manage and secure these devices as efficiently as possible.
Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)
An EMM platform allows you to manage applications and mobile devices from one central platform. This is also referred to as Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM). As an IT administrator, you can roll out all the necessary applications to a group of users in just a few clicks.
Suppose a new employee is hired, you want to get them up and running as soon as possible, so access to exactly the right systems is required. It is all quick and easy to arrange via the platform and this ensures an extra good user experience.
Single sign-on
By activating single sign-on, users only have to log in once to their digital workplace to access all applications available to them.
Private and business completely separate
An EMM platform makes it possible to keep the personal data of employees on mobile devices strictly private because they can create protected environments. Business data and business applications, therefore, remain completely separate from personal data and applications.
Enterprise app store
With the right EMM tools, you can let employees download and install their business applications themselves by setting up a so-called Enterprise Appstore. You can also roll out updates more efficiently and faster thanks to a central EMM platform.
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5. Identity and access management
In addition to the EMM tool, a tool for identity & access management (IAM) is required. It allows you to give users quick and easy access to all the applications they need.
You can think of this tool as an extra layer over the application landscape to give someone access to applications in a few clicks or to adjust and revoke these rights.
6. Managed or unmanaged
Once you have determined the strategy and policy, have drawn up an action plan, have made a thorough inventory and have made all kinds of technological choices, you are faced with the choice whether you want to implement the chosen solution yourself (unmanaged), or whether you engage a specialized party in (managed) so that you keep your hands free for the things that are really important to you as an organization.
7. Bringing together fragmented application landscape
In many organizations, the application landscape has become fragmented over time. There are applications in the local data center, a few legacy systems are still roaming around, some systems are now running in the data center of an outsourcing party and SaaS applications are increasingly being purchased.
By bringing applications together in a coherent hosting environment, you can tie everything together better and easier. The more compact you make this application landscape, the smarter you can make connections between individual applications, the more grip you get as an organization on the consolidated application landscape and the better the user experience of the employees.
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8. Involve employees
In addition to organization and technology, in these types of transitions you always have to deal with the human aspect. It is extremely important that you get your employees involved in the transition. This ensures that the technology that you will switch on will actually be used and that you as an organization can be digitally successful. It’s always about an interplay between organization, technology and people. All three must be balanced before you can become a mobile organization.
Author:
Digvijay Rajddan is Marketing Manager at Design By Lavassa and has served as the Head of Conversion Marketing at Planet Web Solution. He’s an expert in inbound marketing and lead generation.
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What other security measures can we take? Can you elaborate?